About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Sylvia Plath

Encyclopedia : S : SY : SYL : Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Most famous as a poet, Plath is also known for The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel detailing her struggle with clinical depression. Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell are given credit for starting the genre of confessional poetry. Since her suicide, Sylvia Plath has risen to iconic status and is considered to be one of the best poets of her generation.

Contents

Life

Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, a section of Boston, Massachusetts. Born to a German father and an ethnic German Austrian-American mother, Plath showed early promise, publishing her first poem at the age of 8. She attended Wellesley High School. Her father, Otto, a college professor and noted authority on the subject of bees, died of an embolism following surgery (complications from undiagnosed diabetes) on November 5, 1940. It is thought that Plath never fully recovered from the loss of her father. She continued to try to publish poems, and in August of 1950, her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in Seventeen magazine.

Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. She had entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in her junior year, on August 24, 1953, she made the first of her suicide attempts. She later depicted her breakdown through the summer (which she spent as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City) and winter of 1953 in the semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. She was committed to a mental institution (McLean Hospital), and seemed to make an acceptable recovery, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955, the same year she won the prestigious Glascock Prize competition for her poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea."

Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where she continued writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956 (Bloomsday) with Plath's mother in attendance. Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States. Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat in on seminars with Robert Lowell. This course was to have a profound influence on her work. Plath also met poet Anne Sexton during these seminars and became friends with her. At this time Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and remained a lifelong friend. On discovering that Plath was pregnant, they moved back to the United Kingdom. Frieda Hughes was born on April 1, 1960.

She and Hughes lived in London for a while before settling in Court Green, North Tawton, a small market town in Mid Devonshire. She published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, in the United Kingdom in 1960. In February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage. A number of poems refer to this event. The marriage met with difficulties and they were separated less than two years after the birth of their first child. Their separation was due to her mental illness, which was exacerbated by the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife, Assia Wevill.

Plath returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas. She rented a flat in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill (near Regent's Park), in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived; Plath was extremely pleased with this and considered it a good omen. However, the winter of 1962/1963 was very harsh and perhaps the second worst of the century. Finding herself unable to cope, she rang her friend Jillian Becker and spent the last weekend of her life at the Becker household. The Becker home was warm and comfortable and equipped for children, the Beckers having three girls, the youngest a baby of about Nick's age. She appears to have been happy that weekend, and resolved to return home on the Sunday, having made up her mind to something, which only the sequel was to show. On February 11, 1963, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty. The new nanny arrived but couldn't raise Plath's neighbour in the flat below (he was under the effect of the gas). The children were found in good health, if chilled from the cold air of the room (Plath had left the windows open to keep the rooms ventilated; also placing dishtowels in the door cracks to keep her children from inhaling the gas).

Plath is buried in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Rumours of her poverty in the last year of her life have been disputed by later books, particularly Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame. The neutrality of this biography is disputed, and it remains difficult to obtain an objective account of the relationship between Plath and Hughes.

Works

Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. This is controversial, as it is uncertain whether or not Plath had begun divorce proceedings before her death: if she had, Hughes' inheritance of the Plath estate would have been disputed. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has said in a letter to The Guardian that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were talking about a future together right up until her death.

Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary at the age of 11 and kept journals until her suicide in February 1963. Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he destroyed Plath's last journal, which contains entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshmen year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired all of Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013 (50 years after Plath's death). During his last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto Freida and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her edits in December 1999 and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. According to the back cover, roughly two-thirds of the Unabridged Journals is newly unreleased material. The publication was hailed as a "genuine literary event" by Joyce Carol Oates.

In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (for The Collected Poems).

Many critics accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, although he denied this. Examples usually cited are his censoring of parts of her Journals, and his editing of Ariel. This editing involved removing several poems, and rearranging the order in which the works appeared. Some critics have argued this prevented what was intended to be a more uplifting beginning and ending of Ariel, and that the poems removed were the ones most readily identified as being about Hughes. He also cut a deal with Plath's mother Aurelia when she tried to block publication of her daughter's more controversial works in the United States. In his last collection, Birthday Letters, Hughes broke his silence about Plath. The cover artwork was done by Frieda.

While critics initially responded favorably to Plath's first book, The Colossus, it has also been described as conventional and lacking the drama of her later works. The extent of Hughes' influence has been a topic of great debate. Plath's poems are in her own voice and the similarities between the two poets' works are slight.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more confessional area of poetry. It is possible Lowell's poetry--which was often labeled "confessional"--played a part in this shift. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its frank descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as Daddy. Plath has also been heavily criticised for her controversial allusions to The Holocaust, and is known for her shocking use of metaphor. Plath's work has been associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets. Despite criticism and biographies published after her death, the debate about Plath's work resembles a struggle between readers who side with her and readers who side with Hughes. An indication of the level of bitterness that some people have directed at Hughes can be seen in the history of people chiseling the word Hughes off her gravestone. Her headstone has subsequently been rendered more 'tamper proof.'

For Doug Holder's interview with Lois Ames , Plath's social worker, and the author of the introduction to the "Bell Jar" go to this url: http://somervillenews.typepad.com/the_somerville_news/2005/08/august_3_off_th.html

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Children's

Biography

Other references

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: